


Omnivores

by EriksChampion



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Animal Death, Disordered Eating, Gen, M/M, bakura's love language is food
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:13:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21612820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EriksChampion/pseuds/EriksChampion
Summary: The many shades of cohabitating with a temperamental spirit. Sometimes you wake up in the hospital because Bakura thought it would be a good funny joke to treat your body like a human pincushion. Sometimes he decides to wreck the kitchen making salisbury steak and leaves all the washing up for you.
Relationships: Bakura Ryou/Yami Bakura
Comments: 13
Kudos: 41
Collections: Yu-Gi-Oh! It's Time to G-G-G-Gift! [Mini-Exchange]





	Omnivores

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ariasune](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ariasune/gifts).



> For Ariasune, I'm afraid this is a little light on the introspective romance and very very high on the "strange moments"
> 
> For everyone, this story features a brief depiction of an animal being killed to be eaten. It occurs near the end, in the section that starts with "Ryou stood on the patio threshold."

Ryou woke up standing at the kitchen sink. He was lathering his arms up to the elbows. Waking up, he had found, over the years, often felt like being poured back into his body. He came back disoriented. He noticed that the skin on his hands was bright pink and raw looking before he noticed that the water was hot. It took him another moment of watching the steam waft around the kitchen and fog up the window before he noticed that that heat was painful. 

Other things he noticed: the spots of blood on the kitchen counter, the garbage that needed emptying again, the dirty dishes in the sink, the hot soapy water sopping onto the floor.

Ryou drew a face on the steamed-up kitchen window. It was getting dark out. Just dark enough that he couldn’t quite see without turning a light on, which he didn’t. He wiped his mouth. His lips were sticky. He was thirsty. The water was running. 

The many shades of cohabitating with a temperamental spirit. Sometimes you wake up in the hospital because Bakura thought it would be a good funny joke to treat your body like a human pincushion. Sometimes he decides to wreck the kitchen making salisbury steak and leaves all the washing up for you. 

\--

Ryou had learned to speak to Bakura in dreams. Ryou awoke never remembering a single word they had said. But he spent the whole day feeling like he had spent the night soaked in red wine marinade; he was tender with unintelligible feeling. He felt like he had walked very far and seen many strange and wonderful things--shimmering northern lights, cell division, the elliptical shape of time.

But if Ryou awoke with the feeling that he had been left to soften overnight, then Bakura had spent a millennium being scoured with salt. He was pungent.

Ryou had asked him who he was.

A sharp ripple, like the lash of a whip, told him that that was none of his business.

“You must have a name, though.”

“Why’s that?”

Ryou thought that this was a strange question. “…You just have to! Don’t you?”

“I don’t.”

“Oh.”

\--

Ryou had been patient and forgiving at first. If Bakura fell and scraped his knee it was because he hadn’t used legs in so long, he had forgotten what they could and couldn’t do. If he spoke too loud it was because he had forgotten what it meant to speak in a way where other people could hear you. That explained the rudeness of his language, too. The general rudeness of his ways. It must be easy to forget how to behave, Ryou thought, when you’ve lived so long with no one there to teach you.

Bakura was less understanding. He paced holes in Ryou’s living room carpet. He threw a tennis ball against the wall until the neighbors knocked back angrily on the other side. He spent long nights wandering around outside, sitting on stranger’s roofs until the police were called and he had to shimmy down the fire escape and run away and fall and scrape his knee. He talked back. He stabbed someone’s hand with a pencil and when M---sensei sent a stern letter home to his parents demanding that they come in right away, Bakura balled up the letter and threw it in the kitchen sink.

“Hm—your parents travel often for work, don’t they?” M---sensei had asked.

“My father does, yes.”

“But your mother is at home.”

“I live with my father.”

She looked up from the stack of papers she was marking and looked at him. Her eyes looked very large and dark beneath her glasses. 

“Are you at home by yourself?”

Ryou thought of the brown, oily streak that the tennis ball had made, knocking mindlessly against the wall.

“No.”

\--

Bakura stole from him. Twice a month his father wired him fifty thousand yes and twice a month Ryou woke up with hot water, the gas bill paid, the radiator on, his fridge stocked full of homemade ground beef, bacon, chicken stock, and potatoes.

\--

Another thing Ryou tried to forgive him for: every so often he would wake up hunched over and vomiting ground beef, bacon, chicken stock, and potatoes in the toilet—if he was lucky. If he was unlucky, it went all over the bathroom floor. 

Bakura didn’t know how to eat. It had been so long since he’d done it, he just didn’t know how anymore.  
\--  
Ryou threw out the steak.

Bakura took it out of the garbage. And he kept making it. He kept putting Ryou to sleep and forcing him to eat it. Ryou kept waking up sick.

\--

“You need to stop doing this to me,” Ryou said to the empty kitchen. “I can’t eat meat.” The room remained silent. It was tinted pale peach under the kitchen lights. The table and the countertops and the cabinet doors all looked very soft, gauzy, and almost clean. The neatly packed boxes of short ribs in the refrigerator glowed frosty white.

“I know you have your own preferences,” Ryou continued. “And that’s fine. But you have to recognize that this is my body, and you can’t keep making me eat things that make me sick.”

Ryou stood with his hands on his hips and practiced glaring into each of the corners of the room. If Bakura was hiding anywhere, Ryou thought, it would be in the weeks-old crumbs that piled up in the tricky spots under the kitchen table and behind the toaster—the small spaces that he was never able to completely clean. 

The room remained still and silent.

Well, Ryou thought, good then, that they were done with that, and he turned to leave.

“Who decides which bodies belong to which people?”

Ryou stood with one foot in the kitchen and one in the hall and refused to turn around. He didn’t like the sound of Bakura’s voice—how it seemed to come from within and outside him at the same time. “Generally it’s pretty unambiguous. You don’t hear too many stories about multiple people being born into the same body.”

“But this is one of those types of stories.” Ryou thought that he could hear Bakura tapping his foot on the cold linoleum floor. He could feel him crossing his arms, cocking his head to the side with an unimpressed expression. “And it’s not as clear cut as you think. Come over here.”

Ryou shook his head.

“Come back into the kitchen. There’s something I want to show you.”

Ryou lost the feeling in his feet. He was familiar with this feeling, the feeling of being poured back out. It usually started with numbness in his hands or feet. Sometimes he felt lightheaded and faint. Ryou closed his eyes. He knew what would happen next. He would wake up a heaving lump on the floor.  
\--

Ryou opened his eyes. He was standing in the kitchen, refrigerator door open. He was staring at the neat rows of ribs. 

“Take it out.”

“I don’t want to.” Ryou shook his head. “You can’t make me.”

\--  
Ryou woke up sitting at the kitchen table. He had a headache. There was a single serving of short ribs arranged on a clean white plate. He had a glass of water, a bottle of barbeque sauce, a napkin, and no silverware. Ryou wrinkled his nose.

“I don’t like it. It doesn’t look good.” He leaned closer to the plate by a fraction of an inch. “Or smell good.” He made to push it away.

“It’s not about liking, idiot. It’s about doing this one fucking simple task you have to do to stay alive.”

“I was perfectly alive before you got here, if you hadn’t noticed.”

“Perfectly alive?” Bakura made a sound that was halfway between a chuckle and a low hiss. “You’re a mess. You ever think about why you’re so tired all the time? Why you get sick? Every time I go inside ‘your’ body I can barely function I’m so fucking hungry.” He sighed. Ryou heard a thudding sound, as if someone had collapsed into a chair. “Just learn to eat it yourself so I don’t have to.”

Ryou stared at his plate. The meat was reddish-brown and looked soft, just a little shiny. Wrapped around the hard white-reddish-brown bone that jutted out like long, skinny fingers. He could feel the heat radiating off it from all the way over here. 

“I know how to eat,” Ryou said softly.

“Could have fooled me.”

Ryou wrinkled his nose. “I can eat fine by myself.”

“A six pack of mochigashi doesn’t count as food.”

“I don’t have to think about it,” Ryou shrugged. “It tastes nice.”

Bakura made a faint huffing sound. Ryou felt like he was rolling his eyes at him. 

The ribs, in their way, seemed to be rolling their eyes at him as well. Ryou imagined a plate of bulging, bloodshot eyes that stared him down from across the table.

“Just try it,” Bakura said at last. “You eat the whole thing and I’ll learn to make one of your things. An éclair, or a waffle, or something.”

“You think you could handle that?”

The twinge of playful, dangerous confidence was back in Bakura’s voice. “You just worry about eating, I’ll figure out everything else.”

Ryou snorted. “I don’t like the way you figure things out.” He plucked the edge of the plate and slided it closer. “But I’ll try it.”

The meat was slimy and tangy. It was warm, hard, soft, and chewy. It smeared his lips and fingers reddish-brown.

“I don’t understand you, you know.” Bakura sounded weary, as if he staring into the bottom of a glass. “You’re spoiled. And stupid—completely useless.

“You would never have survived an afternoon in the place I come from. You’ve been alive on this earth nearly two decades and you have no useful knowledge. No skills. You don’t do anything or care about anything but your stupid fantasy games. You just—swirl around—like a stupid, little stupid--goldfish.”

Ryou slowly licked the sheen of grease off a thin, pale rib bone. “Thank you for that.” 

“I don’t understand you.”

Ryou set his bone down with a clink. “I’m not very complicated.”

“You have everything and you don’t use it. And out of what—lack of interest? You could die from carelessness. Because you don’t like to think about it. You could starve to death and you wouldn’t even notice.”

Ryou looked down at his plate. He spun it slowly with his fingertip. “I would notice.”

“Why do you eat that crap?” Ryou felt a snap of Bakura’s irritation. 

“Because I like it.”

“That’s a stupid reason.”

Ryou wondered what echoes of himself Bakura could feel. He wondered what it would look like, to see himself from just a slight distance.

“Not everything is about some epic…struggle for survival. It’s nice to just like things.”

Bakura scoffed. “I don’t understand you,” he said again, a little quietly. “How can you be so clueless?”

Ryou looked around at the empty kitchen, beyond which lied the empty entryway, the two empty bedrooms.

“I don’t know.”

He kept eating.  
\--  
Ryou started finding new things around the house. Alongside the chunks of ground beef, stacks of sausages, and plates of chicken thighs he found in the refrigerator, there was a bag of chocolate chips left on the table, a pastry bag on the dishrack. 

He liked waking up softly in the mornings to pull up the shade in the kitchen and see if Bakura had left him anything. 

His first attempts were small and clumsy. Chocolate chip cookies, brownies. Things that tasted like they had been made by someone who had only been made familiar with the concept of desserts through second or thirdhand description. Bakura said he never ate any of it. He did this to prove a point, to keep up his end of the bargain. Not to enjoy himself.  
\--  
One day Ryou stumbled into the kitchen with a heavy, groggy feeling behind his eyes. He had heard—sensed—some strange ruckus in the night. He had woken up that morning about five inches to the left of where he had left himself to fall asleep that night.

He rubbed his eyes. 

There was a chicken sitting in a mixing bowl on the kitchen table. It turned its head to look at him and the way he stood awkwardly hovering in the doorway. Ryou thought that the chicken had the same kind of look to it that he had seen in teachers and older students before—yellow-eyed, analytical, distant and extracting. It was the kind of look that he thought Bakura might try to give him if he could. 

“Um, hello,” Ryou made like he was about to wave, or bow, or do both at once. “What brings you here?”

“I brought it here,” he felt Bakura say somewhere in the back of his mind. “For you.”

“But I don’t want a chicken. I doubt I’d be allowed to keep one.”

He came closer to the chicken. It looked softer up close than it had from a distance. Its feathers were glossy and almost shimmered in warm brown, red, green, and gold. It was warm, and very round, and smelled sweet and a little dirty—like summer dirt and grass. It looked up at him and made a soft, curious sound. It ruffled its feathers a bit, but didn’t make to leave the bowl. Up close, Ryou could see its face better. Its eyes, he realized, were not so much critical and appraising as confused. It didn’t know how to get out of here.

Ryou held out his hand and placed it on top of the chicken’s head. He glided it down the smooth feathers on its back. “And what might your name be?”

“Don’t name the chicken.” Bakura sounded exasperated.

“I can name it if I want to. I’ll call it Fluffy.”

“Don’t call it Fluffy.”

“Why not?”

“We’ve done things your way long enough.” The air around him seemed to shift, as if Bakura was standing up in a grand, sweeping gesture. “It’s not a pet. The chicken is for eating.”

Ryou’s hand fell against the rim of the bowl. “Why would you bring Fluffy here just to kill her?”

“Oh, I’m not going to kill the chicken,” Bakura said. “That’s going to be your job. You know where to buy corn, don’t you?”

\--  
Ryou tried to refuse. He demanded that Bakura take her back to wherever she had come from. He tucked her under his arm and tried to take her to the park, the woods at the edge of town. He tried leaving the back door open and shooing her up and away and into the sky. But when he looked at the dogs running laps around the park, the wild birds floating on the lake, the cars on the road and the smog in the sky, he couldn’t help but think that there weren’t very many places in the world that were safe for chicken. If there were then he didn’t know how to reach them.

He took a bus across town to the scrap yard—a place he never went. He bought boards and wire and nailed together a Fluffy-sized chicken coop to put on the back patio. He whacked his thumbnail with the hammer only three times, which was better than he had expected.

While the weather was still warm, he sat cross-legged on the patio every day after school. He coaxed Fluffy out of her coop and led her on little walks back and forth across the patio. He let her sit in his arms while he stroked her feathers. He learned that she liked to eat cucumbers and thyme, but snubbed broccoli and roses. He took pride in finding the freshest, brightest carrots for her to eat. He wondered what other kinds of preferences chickens had, if she liked living in her coop, if Fluffy wished that she had chicken friends.

Fluffy laid eggs almost every day. Ryou didn’t like collecting them at first. Flumbing around through Fluffy’s bedding and foodscraps and feathers felt too much like stealing. But he had to take them—if he didn’t then her whole coop would fill up with them—there’d be eggs upon eggs stacked up to the ceiling and Fluffy wouldn’t be able to move half and inch without toppling the whole lot of them over and breaking them. 

Ryou collected the pale brown eggs in a pale blue bowl that he kept on the kitchen counter. They were small and very smooth and had small brown speckles. He liked to sit and hold an egg in his hand, feeling how cool and how fragile it was and wondering about everything going on inside. He learned that he liked fluffy scrambled eggs with lots of butter on toast. He started sleeping better, and he didn’t get sick as often.

Fluffy didn’t like it when the weather got gray and cold. Bakura didn’t like that she had gotten so thin.  
\--

“I don’t want to kill her,” he said. “I’m not going to eat her.”

“It’s a chicken. It’s what they do.”

“They don’t just die spontaneously.” Bakura didn’t respond. “I don’t understand why I can’t go to the store and buy—”

“A chicken you haven’t developed feelings for?” Bakura scoffed. “If you don’t do it then I will.”  
\--

Ryou stood on the patio threshold. The sky was heavy and overcast. A cold wind was blowing past him and into the house, where it would blow from room to room and make everything feel cold. 

Fluffy open her eyes and looked at him as he approached. She clucked a little—a soft sound that reminded Ryou of the sound of sleeping. He knelt at her door and opened it a little. He stroked the top of her head and she closed her eyes again.

Ryou held Fluffy in his arms and slit her throat with a very sharp knife. She twitched violently in his arms. He watched her eyes slowly still until they did not move at all. There was a lot of blood.

Ryou brought Fluffy inside and dunked her in a bowl of very hot water. He pulled her feathers off in large chunks. He had thought that without her feathers he wouldn’t be able to recognize her, but he still could.  
\--  
Bakura had asked him many variations of the same question: why he ate so little, why he tried to be like a rabbit and live off sweets and strawberries. Ryou said that that was what he liked, that it was easy because it didn’t take much time or much effort to prepare, that it was easy because he didn’t want anyone to suffer for the sake of him, that he wanted a life without pain.

Bakura had scoffed at him and told him that life was about suffering and that pain was inescapable. He thought that the amount of pain in the world never really changed, it just got moved around. That meant that if Ryou didn’t hurt someone else then someone else would hurt him.

That had been one of their first conversations. Before he had named Bakura after himself. Before Bakura had made him steak and short ribs and profiteroles. Before he had eaten a chicken that tasted like thyme and cucumbers and thought that it was the best thing he had ever had.  
\--  
Ryou stumbled into M---sensei in the hall. In the shuffle between classes she looked at him with her large brown eyes and asked him if he was feeling better.

Ryou felt soft and blushy and pink as he smiled faintly at her and nodded and said, “Yes, I have someone taking care of me.”  
\--  
Ryou walked home with a plastic bag from the drug store flapping in the wind. When he got home he set the bag down on the kitchen table. The days were short, and in the dim early evening light the white box inside looked gray. 

“What’s that?” He felt Bakura pressing up behind him, curiously looking over his shoulder.

“You’ll see.”

Ryou took the plastic fork out of the bag and the box and went out on the patio.

Fluffy’s coop was still there, empty except for the bed of straw that she had left behind. Ryou could still see the shape of her and the shapes of the small safe places where she had kept her eggs.

Out past the patio and down below there was a busy street and apartment towers so tall it looked like they were teetering on stilts. The world was awash in gray light from the sky and sparkling white and purple and orange light from car headlights and streetlights and his neighbor’s kitchen lights and television sets. 

Ryou sat on the ground and opened the box. He took out a slice of cake. It was wrapped in delicate white tissue paper, some of which had begun to cling to the strawberry cream filling and turn soft, sticky, and pink. Ryou peeled back the tissue paper. 

The cake was foamy white with two thick layers of strawberry chunks and cream. There was a bright red strawberry on top—plump and round and glistening. There was a ribbon of cream piped along the edge. 

Ryou brought the cake close to his face and smelled the sweetness of strawberries in winter. He slowly backed out of his own mind. It wasn’t enough to fall asleep completely, just to feel a little pleasantly drowsy. He let Bakura’s eyes slip over his eyes, so it was like he could see the world in two slightly different shades.

He took a bite of the cake.

“Can you taste it?”

“I can.”

It was sweet and light. Very sweet. 

Ryou smiled. “It’s nice, isn’t it?”

“It’s nice.”


End file.
